D ISCUSIÓN

As we have seen, what the Stoics and the medieval Europeans consid- ered to be logic is, in Islamic intellectual life, spread across a number of disciplines, including legal theory, grammar, and literary rhetoric. Nevertheless, logic in its narrow Aristotelian sense played an important role in Islamic intellectual life. This tradition of study and teaching of logic is interesting and important in its own right, but it is also an espe- cially good illustration of the role of scholastic rationalism in Islamic intellectual culture, particularly in education.

For some seven hundred years, seminaries across the Islamic world have required that students take a rigorous course of traditional logic. Instruction was based on a series of short textbooks, explicated through commentaries and glosses. The textbooks of this “school logic” reflected the essentially oral quality of instruction in the seminaries. Given that the seminary training equipped students to explicate Islamic law from sacred texts, it is not surprising that the emphasis of the school logic was on semantics. The school logic was closely linked with philosophical logic, which differed from it in emphasis, and with the disciplines of the prin- ciples of jurisprudence and Arabic linguistics. Despite some influence from Western logic, the school logic is still taught as a basic part of the curriculum in Islamic seminaries in Egypt, Iran, and the Subcontinent.



in the mantle of the prophet, roy mottahedeh’s wonderful book on religion and politics in modern Iran, there is a description of the ten-year-old seminarian Ali Hashemi attending his first classes on logic. The students sit cross-legged in a circle around their teacher, who

reads from a large book, the Commentary of Mulla Abdullah, about the distinction between conception and assent. The students – the brighter ones, at least – pepper the teacher with questions and objections, which the teacher uses to bring out the subtler aspects of the text.1

The scene took place in Qom in Iran in the early 1950s, but it might have taken place in any major Islamic seminary between Cairo and Hyderabad at any time since the fourteenth century and, with the names and some details changed, could equally well have taken place in a medieval European university. Logic seems to have become a regular subject of instruction in Islamic institutions of higher education about 1300, at least in the more sophisticated centers of learning, and it continued even in areas like Egypt and North Africa, where interest in philosophy had virtually died out.

The effort devoted to logic in the seminaries was considerable. For example, in the first four years of the eight-year program in the religious college in Deoband in India in the 1880s, one of the three daily lessons was devoted to logic. Eighteen texts were studied, including several series of text, commentary, and supercommentary.2

Intellectually, this tradition centered on a series of short, standard textbooks, each the subject of hundreds of commentaries. Most of the commentaries were intended for students or were actually student exercises themselves, but some were major works of scholarship. The tradition remained sufficiently vigorous that scores of editions of major and minor texts were printed in the second half of the nineteenth century, as soon as printing came to be accepted in Islamic countries. Elementary texts were published for students, just as in earlier generations scribes had prepared copies for purchase by them,

1

Mottahedeh, Mantle, pp. 69–78. “The Commentary of Mulla Abdullah” is the Sharh. Tahdh¯ıb al-Mant.iq of Najm al-D¯ın ‘Abd All¯ah al-Yazd¯ı (d. 1015/1606), a commentary on a short logic textbook by Sa‘d al-D¯ın Taftaz¯an¯ı (d. 792/1392), a well-known author of textbooks and commentaries in several fields, including logic.

2

On the curriculum of the seminaries in recent times, see, for Egypt, J. Herworth- Dunne, An Introduction to the History of Education in Modern Egypt (London: Luzac, 1938), pp. 41–65; for Iran, Seyyed Hossain Nasr, “The Traditional Texts Used in the Persian Madrasahs,” in Mohamed Taher, ed., Encyclopaedic Survey of Islamic Culture, vol. 3: Educational Developments in Muslim World (New Delhi: Anmol Publications, 1997), pp. 56–73, esp. 65–67, and Aqiqi Bakhshayeshi, Ten Decades of Ulama’s Strug- gle, trans. Alaedin Pazrgadi and ed. G. S. Radhkrishna (Tehran: Islamic Propagation Organization, 1405/1985), pp. 175–80, 258–9); and for India, G. W. Leitner, History of Indigenous Education in the Punjab since Annexation and in 1882 (1882; reprinted Delhi: Amar Prakashan, 1982), pp. 72–79.

and major commentaries were published, obviously for scholarly use. Many of these texts are still being reprinted for student use.

Traditionally this material is dismissed as hopelessly arid – and it is indeed dry – but surely a school of logic whose earliest members were contemporaries of Thomas Aquinas and whose most recent members have seen Russell buried is worthy of attention, as a sociological phe- nomenon if nothing else. This tradition must have spoken in some way to the many generations of students and teachers who passed it on – Mottahedeh documents its influence on a series of major intellectuals of modern Iran – but how? Was it an archaic relic preserved in the curricu- lum out of misplaced academic conservatism, like Latin in the British public schools? Was it a tool for sharpening the minds and memories of aspiring jurisconsults, as an enthusiastic young logic teacher from a Pakistani seminary once told me? Did it aid in debate? Was it used in jurisprudence? Did it introduce students to philosophy? Did it aid the teachers in their own scholarly research? Surely all of these are true to some degree, but how should we weight these factors, and what were the details?

Historians of philosophy or logic oriented toward the European tradi- tion – Kneale and Kneale or Dumitriu, for example – have nothing to say about later Islamic logic because they are working mainly from the Latin sources, and no Arabic logical works after Ibn Rushd were translated into Latin in the Middle Ages.3

The historians of Islamic logic, repelled by the mass of commentaries and supercommentaries, unpublished or in hard-to-read lithographs and old Bulaq editions, dismiss the period – two-thirds of the history of Islamic logic! – as a period of stagnation.4

3

Kneale and Kneale, Development, have nothing on Islamic logic apart from several references to doctrines of Ibn S¯ın¯a and Ibn Rushd discussed by European logicians. Dumitriu, History, vol. 2, pp. 19–36, has a little more.

4

This is the view of Rescher, Development, pp. 73–75, 80–82, whose account of Islamic logic stops with the fifteenth century; of R. Arnaldez, The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed.; s.v., “Mant.iq,” whose account goes up to Ghaz¯al¯ı (d. 1111), and Shams Inati, “Logic,” in Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Oliver Leaman, eds., History of Islamic Philosophy, vol. 2 (Routledge History of World Philosophies I:1; London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 802– 23, whose account stops with Avicenna, nine hundred and fifty years ago. Tony Street, “Arabic Logic,” in Dov M. Gabbay, Handbook of the History of Logic, vol. 1 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2004–). Greek, Indian, and Arabic Logic, attempts to deal with the doctrinal development of philosophical logic between Ibn S¯ın¯a and the fourteenth century but has little to say about the school logic. Idem, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v., “Arabic and Islamic Philosophy of Language and Logic,” http://plato.stanford.edu/

That judgment might be warranted in part, although no one has yet seen fit to demonstrate it, but as we have seen, it neglects three points: first, the evidence of intellectual development within Islamic logic; second, the intellectual question of where we should draw the boundary lines of Islamic logic, and finally, the sociological question of why this kind of logic was taught for so long.